The curse of the England job

DANNY RUST looks at the controversial exit of the national team’s managers down the years…

TUESDAY, September 27, 2016 will go down in history as a day that rocked English football.

An investigation carried out by the called the integrity of the English game into question and, as a result, Sam Allardyce left the post of England manager after just 67 days in charge.

England fans will certainly remember the front page –‘England manager for sale’ – for many years to come.

In the wake of the newspaper accusations, which alleged that Big Sam was prepared to accept a £400,000 payment to represent a fictitious Far East firm and offer advice in circumventing rules on player transfers, the Football Association deemed Allardyce’s position untenable.

The fact that England’s manager had been caught up in the sting brought English football to an all-time low.

Allardyce had only been appointed as Roy Hodgson’s successor in July, and so it will go down as the shortest permanent reign of an England boss.

Allardyce was the man the FA had trusted to turn the national side around after that humiliating 2-1 defeat to Iceland at the European Championships.

Instead, Allardyce saw his new title as a way of bringing in more money and led to the English public accusing him of being greedy.

Considering how regularly England have underperformed in major tournaments, it is surprising that not many past managers have been ousted because of poor results.

In fact, former Three Lions bosses have often been in the same position as Big Sam – caught up in controversy.

Don Revie, at loggerheads with the FA, quit the England job in favour of the United Arab Emirates manager’s position in 1977.

The former Leeds United boss was offered £340,000-a-year to leave his home nation for the Middle East, but the move was made even more con- troversial when he decided to break the news in the The newspaper paid the ex-England international £20,000 in order to get the exclusive, and Revie’s resignation letter did not reach the FA until after the article had already been published in the Mail, which sparked ill-feeling within English football’s governing body. The FA, so outraged by Revie’s conduct, suspended the manager from English football for ten years on a charge of bringing the game into disrepute. Despite the ban being overturned by a court, Revie never managed on English soil again. Like Allardyce, Glenn Hoddle’s reign as England boss came to an end after making controversial comments to journalists. In a newspaper interview, Hoddle was quoted as saying:“You and I have been physically given two hands and two legs and halfdecent brains. Some people have not been born like that for a reason. The karma is working from another lifetime.What you sow, you have to reap.” As a result of his remarks, the FA sacked the ex-Tottenham Hotspur manager a year after leading England at the 1998 World Cup. Hoddle said his comments had been misinterpreted, but eventually apologised for a “serious error of judgment”. The notoriously controversial Fake Sheikh, an investigative journalist formerly of the